Author: shieldfoss

“Rationalists” don’t seem to care very much about the possibility that they’ll be taken over by the Democratic Party apparatus – and the tractor beam has been pulling them in for a few years now, so it’s probably too late.

Oh well, at least the sorts of people who ask for help on Tumblr about insurance disputes with their mother will be able to get wealth and status by tying themselves in knots justifying their support of neocon foreign policy just kidding! They won’t get either, but they’ll do it anyway, because they were grown in vats and optimized for servility.

Really? I thought it was more that all the Rats who could be split off for the right have already been split off, so of course when you remove the right leaning portion of a group the remainder tends Left.

Also not all of us are American, but the idea that the Democratic Party could attract me at all is insane.

I would pay a lot more for a car that was guaranteed not to have anyone playing loud music or aggressively trying to beg from me while I can’t move. If I could sit down, that would be an added bonus.

For one, that sounds like a problem of a system that is too dysfunctional to enforce the rules they already have.

But how much more, really? How much would it cost to have someone drive you to work every day? Is that your limit? Or is it faster to take BART, such that you would be willing to trade off door-to-door convenience and pay even more than that for a first-class car?

also that sounds like a quiet coach, which i think is a thing more often than full on first class?

“First Class” section would typically be no noisier than the “Quiet First Class” section, you’d just pick Quiet First Class first, on the off-chance that a loud person had a first class ticket (Typically somebody having a phone meeting, you would not fucking belive the kind of things people will just say in public when they forget they’re in public. I often fantasized about what it would take to become a corporate secrets dealer; can’t accuse me of theft when you’re giving them away for free on the train! You can get the same effect if you’re just sitting for a while in an up-scale café.)

You can even do that in quiet section. I once sat next to a person who was reading internal memos about some policy discussion of some political importance that I had been vaguely following on the news and I think it even was discussed in my public law class at the time? The stuff I read over their shoulder concluded with a recommended course of action that was implemented exactly as written about a week later.

It was even marked VS-NfD (Verschlusssache – Nur für Dienstgebrauch – so like the lowest governmental secrecy level, but still … not supposed to be read on a train I’m pretty sure).

Hah.

Yeah Diesntgebrauch / NATO RESTRICTED is not actually very restricted, but I probably still wouldn’t want to work with it on the actual train.

“[T]he thing is, all the articles lamenting the demise of Tumblr porn try to elevate their argument into defense of the oppressed, including gays. They assert that Tumblr porn is a critical lifeline to the existence of marginalized groups. I posit that if porn is the basis for your identity, then you have a huge problem.”

Yeah that one is pretty bad. Getting rid of porn just gets rid of porn. Declaring that LGBT content is inherently pornographic, and getting rid of all the non-pornograpic LGBT content, there’s the harm.

My understanding of the Buddhist position on this is that you can reach the first stage of enlightenment (“stream entry”) and still not have purified all of your bad qualities. Compare to eg a religious person who deconverts to atheism, but still has a lot of religious ideas lurking in their metaphysics that they haven’t really examined, or is nervous around the idea of blasphemy.

I think the fourth stage of enlightenment (“arhat”) is by definition supposed to mean you’ve solved all your problems and removed all your bad qualities, but I don’t know how realistic that is or if there’s anybody around who is one.

Also – what bad qualities, exactly? Surely if the Arhat is beating me with a rod, the problem is that I still have impure desires such as “don’t hit me with a rod,” and not any qualities within the Arhat.

I would pay a lot more for a car that was guaranteed not to have anyone playing loud music or aggressively trying to beg from me while I can’t move. If I could sit down, that would be an added bonus.

For one, that sounds like a problem of a system that is too dysfunctional to enforce the rules they already have.

But how much more, really? How much would it cost to have someone drive you to work every day? Is that your limit? Or is it faster to take BART, such that you would be willing to trade off door-to-door convenience and pay even more than that for a first-class car?

also that sounds like a quiet coach, which i think is a thing more often than full on first class?

“First Class” section would typically be no noisier than the “Quiet First Class” section, you’d just pick Quiet First Class first, on the off-chance that a loud person had a first class ticket

(Typically somebody having a phone meeting, you would not fucking believe the kind of things people will just say in public when they forget they’re in public. I often fantasized about what it would take to become a corporate secrets dealer; can’t accuse me of theft when you’re giving them away for free on the train! You can get the same effect if you’re just sitting for a while in an up-scale café.)